Cupertino, California-based Symantec Corp has launched Enterprise Developer, described as the next generation of application development tools for the client-server environment. The product is a major release for the company which says it is moving away from desk top tools, utilities and applications, and concentrating on developing offerings for distributed environments. Enterprise Developer is based on SCALE – Scalable Architecture for Large Enterprise – something that Symantec has been working on for some time and says is unique in the world of development tools. Enterprise Developer has built in modules that include a graphical-entity relationship data modeller, a high level language that can extend forms and two and three dimensional graphics business graphics. But SCALE is the heart of the product and what it does is hide the complexity of programming by isolating the application from the database and automating the client-server interaction. Symantec says that SCALE is made up of three components; a repository, a transaction processor and data links. The repository stores the local data model, business rules and data location. Changes made in the database or in the business rules do not affect anything being used or developed says the company. The transaction processor, which is crucial to Symantec’s claims of a faster and easier development environment, manages the relationships between data elements and automates query/update processes. The data links provide direct links to databases. Symantec believes it is on to a winner: it has been developing SCALE while people have been using Visual Basic and Powerbuilder and claims Enterprise Developer is far easier to use. Ted Schlein, vice-president and general manager of Symantec’s client-server technology group said I have better luck selling Enterprise Developer to users of Powerbuilder and Visual Basic than somebody who has never used something like this. He said users like the fact that Symantec has written all the logic for them. Symantec says it approached the development of the tool from the server end, rather than the client end and the graphical user interface. Schlein said We’ve given people an architecture for the complexity of client-server environments so that developers can spend more time on the user interface so there was a need to isolate the database away from the application development and automate transaction logic. That is what the transaction processor does. Enterprise Developer was launched in the US in June and last week in the UK in what is a version 1.1 edition in which bugs that had been discovered by US users have been resolved. Enterprise Developer needs personal computer with 80386 or more powerful processor, 12Mb of memory, Windows and a hard disk with 15Mb. It comes in two versions: Team for network development, at UKP1,320 for each developer; and Solo, UKP590. Data Links cost UKP730 each.
